Career opportunities are plentiful at the social enterprise working to increase the income of smallholder farmers now and in the future.

Staff member Chivorn tells us how he went from crops to coding with Project Alba.

Senior IT Developer, Chivorn Sors started with Project Alba when the company was just six months old. Driven by a passion to learn about agriculture and to improve the lives of people living in rural Cambodia, Chivorn approached the founders of the company to ask what if any opportunities there were.

Chivorn had been studying economic and management at university as well as working in one of Cambodia’s garment factories where he was streamlining people’s work and making improvements to their productivity. He joined Project Alba when there were just six people, the company is now 40 and faces massive expansion.

Joining the team as an assistant Chivorn first job was working directly with farmers, a vital part of the organisations business model:

“I met with the founders one day and started the next. At that stage we were testing directly on farmers fields, whereas we now have a testing field. I didn’t have much experience growing vegetables but I started to enjoy watching seeds grow and producing natural products.”

Supportive founders and the right environment

“From the field I then went on to work in finance, HR and sales. Start ups allow you to get involved lot of things before you find your niche.”

“I found out the right thing for me is IT. All the positions I had been in I had been involved with coding but very low level. There was a lot of formula to store. I started to create a lot of documents to store data and my CEO Guillaume recognised my talent and started to support me on big formulas and scripts.”

“I’ve had a lot of success that I’m really proud of; I’ve created new systems which fully support the production team and other people across the company, as well as created systems to highlight the key results of the field agents. This helps efficiently identify areas we may need more focus on and areas where good results are being delivered.”

Coding is key in agricultural growth

“In agriculture we don’t see a lot of opportunity in IT but it’s key. We can see all the input data, how production is growing. We cannot scale to 100, 500 and a million farmers without our coding system.”

“The best things about Project Alba: I’ve had the opportunity to identify jobs that would allow me to grow. It’s the same for my colleagues. Our aim to to help farmers and so by working with the team I’m helping my people in Cambodia”